ABSTRACT
The US black liberation movement and its cultural manifestations were global in their appeal, providing marginalized communities in the US as well as abroad with powerful symbols of resistance and self-affirmation in the face of oppression and exclusion. Knowledge of the African American freedom struggle “was transmitted into black ghettos and communities all over the world by Afro-American music”, as Paul Gilroy pointed out in one of his early contributions to African diaspora research. In the years after the success of James Brown’s “Say It Loud,” message songs, allusions to black pride, and hard-hitting funk sounds in soul music flowered. The role of soul music in the struggle for black liberation also became the issue of intense debates between various factions of the ideologically diverse black power movement. While the sound and the movement grew simultaneously with very few interactions in the early 1960s, the black power era witnessed the “marriage of the Black Freedom Struggle to soul music”.
